Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The following day the conference guests began to arrive along the highways and railroad tracks; in fact, the participants had started to trickle into the city the night before, when Carlo Olgiati (in his private car), Henri Massis, and Lucien Rebatet arrived. The first of the two Frenchmen had a wide forehead and a thin mustache that sketched a black triangle beneath his nose; the other was clean-shaven and wore a wrinkled bow tie. I had the impression, when we were introduced, that Massis looked down slightly on Rebatet; but that was common among writers so I didn’t think much of it. Naturally, I never asked them why they’d decided to travel together from France, if they had, nor how they got to Pinerolo and why they’d come two days before the start of the conference. I saw them strolling together through the Piazza San Donato, and it was the town’s fascist mayor who pointed them out to me and made the introductions. Rebatet was carrying a small Italian phrase guide and was trying out the vocabulary with those around him. “Piacere,” he said over and over again; there was something kindly about him, however it was obscured by his rabid anti-Semitism. The next morning, it seemed they had never left the piazza. When I approached them, Massis politely complimented the cathedral’s bell tower, while Rebatet silently flipped through his phrase book, until he finally found what he was looking for and proudly exclaimed: “Torre.” None of us bothered to clarify that the correct word for it is campanile. Just as the mayor was about to object, raising his right hand as if shooing away a fly, loud shouting from one of the plaza’s side streets made us turn around, and a caravan of black cars drove in and stopped in front of us. Two SS officers got out of the first vehicle and opened the back doors. As always, our German friends had planned a triumphant entrance (their retreats are usually quite different, from what I’ve seen). This one wasn’t particularly magnificent, actually, because the black cars had turned the typical gray color of the dust on the roads, because the SS were sweaty, and because Hanns Johst, the most important literary man in the country that aspired to dominate the world, was also sweaty and covered in dust, like an obese pigeon.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Some of the Germans were in uniform, but the impression they gave wasn’t exactly bellicose. Eberhard Möller was wearing enormous glasses that he was constantly wiping on his sleeve, and Heinrich Zillich, in his Wehrmacht uniform, wasn’t particularly imposing by his side. As they spoke, Hans Blunck’s prominent jaw always pointed toward Johst, the man who had at least partially if not totally ousted him from his position of prominence in German literature, but Johst seemed to be paying attention only to himself, as if he were in a room lined with mirrors. In some sense, his presence was a relief to me, because he’d completely taken charge of the situation since his arrival: he assigned tasks to the others in his party, arranged the lunch and dinner schedules, sent some of the German authors (whom he didn’t appear to like) to their lodgings, took a quick look at the Duomo, taking it in with what surely seemed—to him—a greatness comparable to that of the cathedral itself, entered the first of a line of cars, and disappeared.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Ion Sân-Giorgiu arrived in the afternoon, at a moment when Almirante and I were arguing with the mayor about the decoration of the room where the deliberations were to be held. The mayor insisted it had to have an Alpine stamp, so he had some crossed skis hung to preside over the room. We recognized Sân-Giorgiu because he was wearing a generic black uniform to which he’d applied some swastikas, and because he walked the way Romanians usually do, leaning slightly to the left. When I greeted him, I told him we were expecting his fellow countryman Niculae I. Herescu, and he replied he didn’t think that ne’er-do-well would show up. He was right, but we didn’t find that out until the next day, when a French policeman from the town of Ferrals-les-Corbières—who wasn’t entirely without compassion, which is to say, a completely heretical French policeman unfit for duty—sent a telegram to Minister Mezzasoma saying he had a Romanian by the last name of Herescu who said he’d been invited to a writers’ conference and was demanding we pick him up in France because he didn’t have the means to cross the border. There was no need for the policeman to add that Herescu had drunk up those means on the train.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
It seemed the Spaniards had also been drinking on the train, or rather on the airplane. They arrived at night, as we sat at a large table presided over by Hanns Johst in one of the local restaurants; forgive me for resorting to cliché, but the truth is the Spaniards brought a bit of joy to a meal that had taken a gloomy turn right at the start, partly because Germans don’t exactly light up social events—not even in wartime, it seemed—and partly due to Johst’s words. We had to drink from his lips a panoply of reflections on “sacrifice,” the “blood spilled,” the “necessary effort we all must make,” and the “purpose of the highest art” before he’d let us lay into the food. The Spaniards, on this occasion, uncharacteristically arrived, shall we say, right on time, but their enthusiasm waned as soon as they saw their German colleagues; only the food and drink—particularly the alcohol—managed to somewhat lift our spirits. Taking advantage of one of the inevitable pauses between the second and third courses, or between the third and fourth—in Pinerolo they didn’t seem to be at war, and the dishes kept coming, as if they were rolling down the sides of the mountains around us, which, in a way, was actually true— Eugenio d’Ors stood up to inflict on those in attendance a speech about classical antiquity, which he saw reflected in the faces of his Italian friends, he said, although, for the moment, his Italian friends were only Giorgio Almirante, the mayor of Pinerolo, and me. As you can see, I don’t exactly have the face of a Polykleitos and, in that sense, can only serve to demonstrate how horrible classic antiquity was. D’Ors went on about the need to maintain those classical aesthetic canons, about the importance of those preservation efforts giving rise to an idea of authority, about that authority in turn guaranteeing access to a sexuality that is a matter for gentlemen, Catholic gentlemen in particular—I don’t know why he said this; perhaps he was inviting us to a brothel and we didn’t catch on—and about the superior nature of a classical, reasonable, and authoritarian lifestyle. When he sat down again, there was some timid applause, which wasn’t seconded by Luys Santa Marina, who was absentmindedly stroking some embroidery on the front of his shirt: three skulls and crossbones with an inscription. I later asked him what the inscription meant and he told me: “It means ‘it doesn’t matter,’ ” referring to the three death sentences he’d been handed down in Republican jails during the Spanish Civil War. Rafael Sánchez Mazas didn’t clap either, barricaded behind his glasses observing everything like an injured owl that would have flown off if it could. Naturally, I don’t have many memories of how that night ended, but I do remember the embroidery on Santa Marina’s blue shirt, Sánchez Mazas’s gaze, the way all the German writers stood up at the same time and said goodbye to us with a choreographed nod of their heads and a succession of raised arms, how then Eugenio Montes and I were talking in low voices, with Montes asking me about the border situation in the Italian Social Republic. I also remember that, while we walked back to our lodgings through the already starkly empty streets of Pinerolo, Montes told me the story of Saint Genesius of Rome. According to the Spanish writer, Genesius was a Roman actor who was mocking baptism during a play when he had a revelation and asked to be baptized, and was then jailed and deported, and I think killed too, and that he’s the only Catholic saint who’s typically represented with a mask on. I don’t remember why Montes started telling me about Genesius, but I do remember that I asked him how the audience had known that the request for baptism wasn’t also just part of the show; by which I mean, how did they know that the play Genesius was performing wasn’t about a Roman actor making fun of baptism during a performance when he has a revelation and asks to be baptized; I also asked him if perhaps the deportation
and killing weren’t also part of the show, its natural consequence or perhaps an accident, since it was unlikely that Genesius really wanted to die; but Montes, I recall, just looked at me strangely.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Why is it that everything we can say about those years seems untrue or, if it is true, seems like it didn’t really happen? I don’t get it, I don’t really understand it even today.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The next day Ottavio Zuliani arrived, as did some low-level bureaucrats from the ministry who were accompanying the Italian writers, who, once again confirmed the cliché—you can see this story is filled with them—by arriving late, in cars that the ministry had offered them in Genoa, Bologna, Salò, Venice, and Milan. Our German friends had taken their seats in the room at Town Hall designated for the early morning deliberations, long before the Italians and the Spaniards. When the Spaniards got there, they insisted on putting together work committees whose function eluded the French, the Germans, and me; they won out, however, and, at least nominally, the conference had five committees respectively designated as “Basic Procedures and Guidelines,” “Translation,” “Aesthetic Problems,” “Classical Studies,” and “Propaganda.” We left open the question of who would be on each committee until everyone had arrived, but when they had—I’m specifically referring to the Italians, headed up by Zuliani with the octogenarian Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy on his arm, although she was dragging him down to her pace, which was so slow they both seemed to be walking backward—we all pretended to have forgotten about the work committees.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
There wasn’t time for introductions despite the fact that many of us had never met our foreign colleagues in person. Hanns Johst stood up and started to sing “Horst-Wessel-Lied” and then we sang our song “Giovinezza,” after which there was some controversy, a bit of an argument, when the Spaniards demanded the chance to sing theirs and Johst and the Germans refused, claiming we didn’t have time. Some Italians supported the Spaniards, as did Lucien Rebatet, but the proposal was set aside amid protests and murmuring, to move on to the election of the conference president and secretaries. Naturally, Johst was chosen for the top position: we Italians filled some of the secretariat positions as the hosts, and the others were filled by Spaniards, who were still insistently railing against the snub of not being allowed to sing their “Cara al Sol,” though they’d toned it down somewhat, pacified by the secretarial positions and the presence of Johst’s SS, who had taken their places at the back of the room, ostensibly guaranteeing the safety of the German writers. When I turned to look at them, at the very start of the conference, I recognized a face from the past, one I had known well and hadn’t seen for years, that I believed to be just another of the faces of the war dead, and that was the face of someone, I thought, who’d come to commit a crime.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
They drove us to Pinerolo in some vehicles that must have been previously used by the butchers of Salò because they smelled of animals and death. I traveled with Filippo Gentilli; our conversation started haltingly and died even before we’d left Milan, where we’d arrived exhausted. As we reached Pinerolo, Gentilli pulled one of his books out of his luggage and scribbled something in it. When he handed it to me, I discovered he’d inscribed it to me. The dedication read: “To the poet of Ravenna, Espartaco Boyano, from his humble, devoted teacher Filippo Gentilli.”
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
He was wearing—I remember it well—a ring on the middle finger of his right hand, so that whoever extended their hand to shake his would be reminded by its awkwardness that he preferred to be greeted in a different manner. That ring was a reminder that one should always raise one’s hand, even in private, in the fascist salute.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
There was a story about Filippo Gentilli that he himself, for some reason, had spread, possibly as a warning. Gentilli lived in L’Aquila, where he had some family properties and made an effort to project an image as a royalist and traditional writer—which is to say, as a harmless writer, that is if being royalist and traditional isn’t offensive, for example, to other people’s intelligence. A few years earlier, he’d been confronted by a handful of writers who wanted to reinvigorate the local literary scene, which I imagine as small and possibly nonexistent. Gentilli chose the most talented among them, the most promising, and signed that writer’s name to a handful of poems that he then sent to a Roman newspaper where he had contacts: the poems were clearly and unequivocally plagiarized from works by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the first to reveal them as such a few days after in the pages of the same newspaper that had published them, so the ringleader, the most talented of the young writers hoping to reinvigorate the local scene—a small and possibly nonexistent scene, I reiterate—was ridiculed in the press and literary circles for months. He could only publish once the scandal had blown over, seven or eight years later, and then only in a tiny house in Pescara; but by then it was already too late, for both him and his readers. Meanwhile, Gentilli and his books dominated the literary scene in L’Aquila and would continue to do so for some time, although, as I mentioned, that scene is quite possibly negligible and perhaps doesn’t even actually exist.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
That young man was named Giovanni Rossi; I met him briefly and he told me his version of that story. In it, in his version, he and others had read Gentilli’s work and discovered dozens of poorly concealed plagiarisms—“Like the dead on a battlefield, buried hastily in shallow graves before the enemy troops returned,” he said—and they denounced them in L’Aquila with the scant means they had and against majority opinion in the town, which considers Gentilli a local product in a way, like a cheese. Often, I suppose you already know this, we writers are merely local brands, due to the completely erroneous idea that we and our books can, and perhaps should, represent a country, a region, an identity of some sort. So Gentilli—to continue with the military metaphors—counterattacks and destroys Rossi, not only in L’Aquila but in the entire country, and not just for a short while but for the rest of his days. Those who read about Gentilli’s plagiarism soon forgot about it, among other reasons because it is always easier to believe that a young man has plagiarized than that an older, recognized writer has, no matter how modest his recognition. When I met him, Rossi had published a second book of poems, a very slim one, which he gave me: the press, almost unanimously, described it as influenced by the poet from L’Aquila Filippo Gentilli; by then things had changed, however, and that attribution of influence was a form of disdain.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I didn’t think the conference was going to happen, and I didn’t know the republic’s literary establishment considered my presence a contribution to the cause of European fascism. My books didn’t seem to be contributing. The invitation came in the form of two members of the Black Brigades bursting into my home here in Ravenna and demanding I quickly pack a suitcase because they had orders to take me with them. Neither offered any reasons and I didn’t ask for any, as actually I’d been expecting their visit for some time. A few days earlier I had sent my wife and children to Lido di Dante, a town on the outskirts of the city where we had some acquaintances, to avoid any unpleasantness when they came for me. As I packed my suitcase in the bedroom, I heard the soldiers rummaging around in the house in search of something they could later sell. There must not have been anything of interest because they shouted for me to hurry up. I thought the suitcase was simply a ruse to avoid frightening the neighbors and that, really, where they were taking me, I wouldn’t be needing it. So I just packed two shirts and a book I was reading at the time. Which one? Nothing particularly significant: a little romantic novel by Flavia Morlacchi that belonged to my wife. We walked down the stairs in silence, knowin
g that the neighbors were watching us from behind their doors. A cat owned by the caretaker wound around my legs as we crossed through the lobby. When it tried to do the same thing to one of the soldiers, he kicked at it, but the cat dodged his foot and walked haughtily over to its owner. When I went outside I found another soldier waiting in the driver’s seat of a black car with no license plate. A moment before getting into it, I looked up at the sky and saw three low-flying planes pass over our heads. I didn’t know if they were Italian planes, or German, or American, and I don’t remember if I cared, but I do remember in that moment I thought of an aerial painting of Ravenna that Fedele Azari made in 1927. I couldn’t bring up the image, however, just the title, which its author had whispered into my ear during an opening, and it was The Will to Die Kissing His Children. I thought the pilots of those planes were, in that moment, seeing what Azari had seen and painted and were in fact living inside his painting, except they didn’t know it, and they were unaware that what was once art was now murder. I got into the car. Azari had committed suicide fourteen years earlier, by the way. In January 1930.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 6
